The band Steely Dan said they could have carried the torch for: “Very attractive to us”
They may have undergone something of a cultural reappraisal in recent years, and attracted a healthy dose of younger fans that they wouldn’t have otherwise garnered in their heyday, but Steely Dan haven’t always been the immensely popular band that people think of them as now.
As someone who considers the work of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to be hugely important in the canon of rock and roll, despite not having been there for their initial rise, it’s hard to wrap my head around the disgust and revulsion I am met with when mentioning my adoration for the duo to many people from generations before me. The trouble is, to people growing up in the 1970s, Steely Dan, for all of their talent and pop sensibility, were seen as being the antithesis of cool to youngsters at the time.
They’re not alone in this, however, as there have been several other examples of acts that people have come to realise the brilliance of over time, despite there being plenty of evidence there to show that they’ve always had impeccable songwriting chops. There’s no denying that punk, metal and disco were the subcultures that were most popular in the ‘70s, and so for Steely Dan to come out swinging with their easygoing brand of jazz-pop was a bold move, and one that seemingly only attracted die-hard fans rather than casual appreciators.
The same could be said for a band like the Grateful Dead, who during the late ‘60s and ‘70s amassed a gigantic cult following, but were never appreciated on a wider scale because of their insistence on playing to a particular niche. Their jazzy, yet countrified positioning within the counterculture movement meant that they were lauded by those who ‘got’ them, and utterly repulsive to anyone looking in from the outside.
That being said, they had at least two appreciators in Fagen and Becker, who saw a certain amount of similarity between how they were treated and also in terms of their musical ambitions. Forever trying to outdo themselves in the scope of their releases, both bands were hailed as creative geniuses by their ardent supporters, and people have slowly begun to realise that this was always the case, despite decades of mockery and derision.
In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, Fagen suggested that Steely Dan could have easily become the torchbearers for what the Grateful Dead had done before them, and praised the creative risks that they took when it came to jamming and improvisation within their live performances.
“Although they recorded so many shows, some of them were a mess,” Fagen surmised, “Generally speaking they had a really nice groove, and the way they interacted with each other musically was very attractive to us. At one point, I think if we didn’t go the way we went, we might have tried to do something more improvisational like the Dead.”
While there was ultimately nothing stopping the duo from taking this direction, they would eventually part company after the release of their 1980 album Gaucho, and leaving behind a legacy that would only truly be held up in the high regard it deserves to be after their demise. Much like the Grateful Dead, their fanbase remains as strong as ever, but somehow, the lasting impact of their music seems to be rubbing off on a wider audience.
